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As mentioned before, I’m prepping to move so I’ve been clearing things out and throwing away stuff that I don’t need anymore. Yesterday I stumbled upon some old notebooks and thought I’d share some pics.

Here’s some stuff from my MOTHER 3 translation hacking notes. I literally have a notebook or two filled with stuff like this. I don’t need it anymore so I decided I’d take some pics and then throw the notebooks out.

I’m not 100% sure what this is, I’m guessing it had to do with the battle text routine though.

In general I write down all my thoughts/ideas/plans on any nearby notebooks and notecards. As a result I always have hundreds of notecards on my desk at any one time. Here are a bunch that were in one of my MOTHER 3 notebooks. Luckily I now use a simple daily planner so that’s cut down on the note card count a little 😛

Here’s me working out the details of sprite welding. Man, it seems like that was a lifetime ago but also just yesterday.

I guess this is me trying to figure out how sprite OAM works so we could get more text on menu screens in MOTHER 3 than would normally have been allowed.

Dunno what this is, it looked cool so I took a pic. I think it might be related to the game’s sprite text queue and control code routines.

Working on something related to item name lengths. I guess this is where we expanded stuff in memory to allow for longer item names. I didn’t want to have to skimp on item names, because I loved how EarthBound had much longer item names than other RPGs back then.

Working out the details of Hard Mode! Contrary to popular belief, it does more than just increase enemy HP, it also alters some other stats, it looks like it at least changes speed too. I do vaguely remember testing enemies with super-high speed and thinking that it seemed to make them meaner, but it was so long ago I don’t remember anymore.

Working on a checklist of video clips to get for the translation patch video!

After I got the clips, Plo put the actual thing together. I’m still mad at myself for accidentally recording clips with Kumatora named simply “Kuma”, giving people the wrong impression that we had to cut her name down.

Some early planning/development on EarthBound Central!

Some early ideas for content/updates for EarthBound Central before I even made the site. Looks like I’ve done most of those things now.

Every month, the site design here changes slightly to have a different theme. This is me trying to think up different ideas for each month. I’m pretty sure the pattern doesn’t follow these notes anymore though. Speaking of which, for years I’ve been wanting to redesign the site. Will I ever get to? I dunno, we’ll have to just wait and see. TO BE CONTINUED

Some planning on Game Swag, a site I started a while back. It’s been hit hard by spammers and hackers lately, and it turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I thought, so I’m considering closing it down or putting it in stasis. I’d like to simplify it and streamline it at some point, I think I aimed too high and tried to do too much with it. Again, like the EB Central redesign, I dunno when/if I’ll get around to doing anything though 😛

Aaand that’s all the pics I took. I got some other notebooks around here still, but unless they’re especially interesting I’ll probably just toss ’em without posting anything here. But stay tuned for more updates of stuff I’ve re-discovered!

Like other people said, I’m sure someone would buy these, or if you’re not keen on selling them, they’d love to have them. This is the sort of thing that gets a lot of sperglords their jollies.

Magicxgame said on Oct. 15, 2012

Mato, people will buy anything. Unless you have some moral objection to it, I recommend tossing them in the sell pile for aspiring programmers/translators/fans/etc.

Reficul said on Oct. 15, 2012

This is pretty neat. Doubt I’d buy them from you since they are a bunch of notebooks filled with your own personal scribbles (and if your notes are anything like mine, they’re difficult for anyone else but you to get), but still neat nonetheless.

Barbaloot said on Oct. 15, 2012

Honestly mato, I might have bought this.

Magicxgame is correct, really. It’s not like you couldn’t throw them out later. You really should throw them up on ebay. I’m sure SOMEONE would just love to have a little piece of the very first localization of this amazing game.

Agreed. I can think of a number of people, myself included, who would buy this notebook.

Anonymous said on Oct. 15, 2012

Speaking of the item names, I couldn’t help but notice that the item names in the M3 fan translation are capitalized, while the ones in EarthBound only capitalize proper nouns and the first letter in the item name. Is there any particular reason for the change?

Dragon Quest localizations employed a similar practice with the new traduction tradition introduced in the Dragon Quest VIII localization 10 years after EarthBound, which is funny because the series started as a pastiche of Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest manages to make it so that the initial letter of common noun item names are in lowercase in the middle of the sentence. Contrast with how EarthBound always has the first letter of even mundane items capitalized so you get stuff like “Inside the present, there was a Cookie!”

FuzzyPicklez said on Oct. 15, 2012

Speaking of the item names, I couldn’t help but notice that the item names in the M3 fan translation are capitalized, while the ones in EarthBound only capitalize proper nouns and the first letter in the item name. Is there any particular reason for the change?

Dragon Quest localizations employed a similar practice with the new traduction tradition introduced in the Dragon Quest VIII localization 10 years after EarthBound, which is funny because the series started as a pastiche of Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest manages to make it so that the initial letter of common noun item names are in lowercase in the middle of the sentence. Contrast with how EarthBound always has the first letter of even mundane items capitalized so you get stuff like “Inside the present, there was a Cookie!”

Apple Kid said on Oct. 15, 2012

Yeah I would buy it too. But maybe we should just take things like the Earthbound anthology, a few carts (of Earthbound) and stuff like that to make a “Mother Museum” what do ya think about that?

Anonymous said on Oct. 15, 2012

If you don’t want to sell it, you could give it out as a prize or something. It would be a waste to see it scrapped.

Anonymous said on Oct. 15, 2012

You could give it away in a contest or someone who’s associated with one of your sites if you’d rather not sell it.
It would be a shame to see it get scrapped.

anton said on Oct. 16, 2012

again I have to thank you for all the time, effort and persistence you put into making this translation happen. it was at the very least, heroic. 🙂

JeffMan said on Oct. 16, 2012

Holy crap, you kept notes? Am I crazy for doing my stuff in my head

Earth Saturn said on Oct. 16, 2012

@JeffMan, I don’t understand how that’s even possible. Could you tell me how you were able to do this?

Jeff: More than notes they’re more like jumbled-up calculations and stuff that I jotted down. And random addresses that have no meaning anymore. Looking back I don’t know what the heck I was doing most of the time 😯

Mr. Tenda said on Oct. 16, 2012

Do you use a special kind of daily planner, or some generic kind? I make similar random notes a lot and the planners that Itoi’s company makes are really interesting but it seems like there’s no English equivalent

For my daily stuff I now use a cheap $3 planner from Walmart or wherever. I use it to write down the stuff I need to get done each day, not necessarily for notes or for journal-ish purposes. But sticking with it’s helped me a lot in many different ways. I used to try to keep everything in my head (and I still do) but it’s nice to have less on the brain 😛